The reason for this party? First of all, it’s my birthday! I turn 40 today! Yeah, I can barely believe it. Cake for me. 🙂

But there’s an even greater reason to party. I am now able to offer patterns and ebooks directly from my own Polka & Bloom site again. I’ve not been able to do that since the start of 2015! So I’m super-super happy about this!

Below you can read more about why I’ve not been able to do this and how it will work from now on.

EU VAT funtimes!

If you’ve followed Polka & Bloom for a while, you may remember that I’ve talked about the incredibly frustrating EU VAT law that came into force on January 1st, 2015.

In a nutshell, since the start of 2015, I’ve not been able to offer ebooks and digital patterns on my own site because it would mean a LOT of confusing dealing with VAT. Seriously, the different countries interpret things differently and some countries don’t even know what to do about small businesses like Polka & Bloom.

So much frustration and confusion over the past year and a bit. Tears. Swear words.

The dumb law hasn’t gone away, sadly. BUT. I have finally figured out a way to use the shop on my own site to offer patterns and ebooks. YAY!

I have basically had to manually copy all the pattern and ebook items to a separate section for EU/UK customers. Not a glamorous job at all!

EU/UK customers will now be able to buy patterns and ebooks without paying the current VAT rate in their country for digital products. However, these items will be delivered by email and not a direct download. Because that dumb EU law says that some human intervention has to take place for the purchase to be exempt from VAT.

Super annoying, I know. But by doing it this way, EU/UK save money (almost 30% VAT in some countries!) and I save a lot of hazzle.